Apple and iPhone could miss one of the most exciting new mobile technologies - Forbes

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He may not be the most powerful owner of the games, but it is important. Microsoft yesterday extended its test of the Project xCloud game streaming service beyond the iPhone to Android and gave iPhone users the first contact with one of the most exciting technologies that reach mobile devices. It's a brave new world, even if only a very small number of iPhone users can currently use it.

I was almost surprised to see it: Apple has long suspected of allowing everything on its devices that could be interpreted as competition for the App Store, and that's probably why we saw this slow start. This is not the case with the competition: Android users can now play with Google Stadia and GeForce Now from Nvidia and have had access to xCloud Beta for months. IPhone users are already behind and even what they have now is full of limitations.

Halo Infinite

Credit: Microsoft

Microsoft's Major Nelson described some important limitations in a blog post. Android users can currently play 50 full games. However, due to the limitations of the App Store, iPhone users are limited to only one title: Halo: The Master Chief Collection . In addition, they cannot use the Xbox console streaming feature, which allows you to stream from your own computer. The test is also complete as it is currently limited to 10,000 users.

Game streaming in its ideal form promises to drastically increase the gaming capacity of a mobile device, just as video streaming significantly expands the TV display functions of a mobile device. The idea is similar: the game is not played on local hardware, but in a remote data center. The local device displays the received images and sends input from the player. The promised effect is to convert any device with a screen and an internet connection into something that can display the most resource-intensive games available, which was previously only possible with powerful and expensive machines. Now we can do it with powerful machines and other people's faces.

It remains to be seen what impact the broadcast will have on the mobile gaming landscape, but these massive iPhone restrictions on fast-growing streaming features on Android can't help me believe that Android will continue to play the main role in this to play new technology, both in these early stages and re-established.

The competition isn't that shy: Yesterday Samsung announced a partnership with Microsoft that clearly shows that the game should be streamed as it becomes available.

It is encouraging to see that Apple allows transmission in a certain capacity. However, the game limit seems to indicate that app store restrictions will continue to be a major hurdle as more companies are making progress in space, although we can expect Android technology to evolve rapidly. , If Apple wants to keep up with some of the most exciting mobile gaming services, it needs to relax some of these limitations.